One Piece, volume 1: "Romance Dawn"

This review was comissioned by @Psuedo Nym


After the first wave of big, long-running shonen series in the 1980's (Dragonball, Fist of the North Star, JJBA, etc), there was a second crop of major series that started printing in the mid-to-late 90's. Naruto, Inuyasha, etc. From what I've seen of them, these second-gen shonen leviathans are characterized by being influenced by anime as much as they were by earlier manga. Of this second crop, One Piece by Oda Eiichiro has been the most successful at selling issues.

In fact, One Piece has the honour of being the best-selling manga of all time.

This manga has sort of a muddled beginning. It officially started in 1997, with its serial publication in Weekly Shonen Jump. However, the first two issues of it are just slightly modified versions of an earlier one-shot comic of Oda's and its extemporaneous sequel. And, having read the first volume of One Piece and compared these first two chapters to the six that following them, well...it shows. It really shows. The older shorts may have been given a touch-up before being rebranded as One Piece #1-2, but there's still a very noticeable difference in quality between them and everything after them.

I've also been told by quite a few people that One Piece doesn't get good until a certain arc a little ways in. While I've had people tell me "wait, it's about to get good, trust me" about quite a few series before, in THIS case all of them were in perfect consensus about when that point would come, and several of them also told me this before I had ever started reading let alone judging the first issue. So, I'm inclined to believe that One Piece becomes a much stronger work a little ways passed what I've read.

Which says something, because other than those first two chapters "Romance Dawn" ain't bad.

So, I've decided to split this review into two posts. The first will consist mostly of me tearing the first couple of issues apart. The second, looking at the One Piece-original material, will be considerably more positive in tone.


One Piece introduces itself with a background premise presented up front. Some years ago, the legendary pirate king Gold Roger was put to death, but his coveted treasure hoard, known as the "One Piece," remains safely hidden. The state was unable to extract its location from him prior to the beheading.

Since then, a veritable locust swarm of treasure-hunters have been searching the seas for a hint leading to the One Piece. In turn, all manner of pirates and fraudsters have taken to the waters to prey on them.

Essentially, all the pirate energy that was concentrated in Roger's operation has been released to create a global upwelling of piracy.

The world and setting have been...very vaguely defined...so far. Technology seems to be more-or-less eighteenth century or thereabouts, but there are some weird exceptions (people know what rockets are, apparently, and fashion includes things like T-shirts and baseball caps). The region our story starts in is "governed" by a dystopian state whose local manifestation consists entirely of tyrannical navy officers who basically rule the areas around their bases as kings (for all that volume one shows, the government these naval warlords serve might not even exist anymore). Our story begins in a forgotten little fishing village, and with this insufferable little shit:

His name is Monkey D. Luffy, and for the next seventy-some manga pages he is going to be the bane of my existence.

Luffy's backwater little town is in a vulnerable position, being far away from the mixed blessing of naval authority along a coast ridden with greedy opportunists. For now, the townsfolk have entered into a symbiotic relationship with a pirate ship let by the dashing Captain "Red-Haired" Shanks. Shanks' crew provide protection and spend a bit of their ill-gotten gains buying supplies from the villagers, and the villagers provide anchorage and secrecy. No one's quite sure how things will go once Shanks' crew move on to different waters in a year or so. Luffy wants more than anything to join the crew and leave the village along with them when the time comes, but Shanks doesn't want him because he's only like eight years old and also really annoying.

The story begins with Luffy intentionally marking himself with a knife in a failed attempt to impress the pirates. And also with him haranguing the pirates for not being tough and violent enough to please his imagination when some mountain tribesmen come by and they don't let themselves get baited into an unwise fight by the shit-talking chief. And also with him sneaking into the pirates' stuff, stealing the unique, incredibly valuable magical fruit that they just looted from an enemy ship, and eating it for dessert without telling anyone.

On one hand, he's a kid. On the other hand, that third one crosses the line into him being a thoroughly unlikeable kid. Especially when, after getting found out, he expresses zero shame or remorse, makes no attempt at an apology, and still acts the exact same way toward his people's guardians that he did before.

Luffy is initially alarmed when the magic of the "devil fruit" changes his body, turning him into something along the lines of living rubber. Once he gets the hang of it and realizes he basically has Mister Fantastic powers now, though, he gets, well...

Yeah. I'm sure Shanks and his crew are just falling more in love with this kid with every passing day. :/

The fruit's effects also come with a downside. Rubber Luffy is very resistant to injury, and able to do all kinds of stretching stunts, but he also has become strongly negatively buoyant. Drop him in water, and he'll sink like a lead weight. He already didn't know how to swim (yet another issue that Shanks kept pointing out to him when explaining why he wasn't ready for a piratical career just yet), but now he'll never be able to learn to either. He gets the nickname "Anchor" on account of this unfortunate trait.

One day, when the pirates are out at sea, those mountain raiders come back. Finding the village undefended, they decide to, well, raid it. Luffy decides he's not going to be a pussy like those worthless pirates who he still wants to join and who's priceless relic he's glad he ate. Against the instructions of every non-bandit adult in the vicinity, he picks a fight with the entire group of them. On one hand, his rubber body is pretty much unbreakable. On the other, he's not any stronger than he was before, and the mountain bandits are interested in him now.

Just as Luffy has annoyed the bandit chief into just killing him rather than selling him despite the tearful protestations of the townsfolk, the pirates come back. This time, it's too late to avoid a fight. Or, well. Maybe they *could* still avoid a fight, but letting the bandits take Luffy and probably extort supplies before leaving is too big a price to pay. Captain Shanks is probably tempted to let them have the supplies as payment for ridding him of Luffy after the devil-fruit incident, but he's too principled of a pirate for his own good.

The fight scene is...mostly lighthearted cartoon violence, except for the part where Shanks' firstmate intercepts a charging bandit by putting out his cigarette against the man's eyeball. Complete with a sizzling sound. And another panel after that one dedicated to the one-eyed man thrashing on the ground holding onto his face and screaming in agony. It's, uh, a bit of a tonal clash. And seemingly not being played for the purpose of demonstrating that Shanks' crew are brutal in battle despite their otherwise pleasantness, or for Luffy to realize what the violence he's been lusting for really looks like in practice. It's just a thing that gets a weird amount of page space devoted to it and then forgotten without anyone getting a chance to react to it and the rest of the fight just being normal shonen battle stuff again.

When the battle goes against his men, the bandit chief manages to slip away in a rowboat with Luffy as a hostage. He tosses the boy overboard once he's made his getaway, but the random encounter table ends up causing the sinking Luffy to outlive him.

Naturally, it goes for Luffy as well once it's swallowed the bandit and his rowboat in a single bite. But, apparently Captain Shanks was swimming after them this whole time. And he rescues Luffy. At the cost of his arm.

I'm not entirely sure how this rescue is supposed to have worked. Like, we see the rowboat, with the bandit kicking Luffy overboard. The giant eel eats the boat with its remaining occupant, and then starts moving toward the sinking Luffy. Then suddenly Shanks is there in the water pulling Luffy away from its clashing jaws; I assume he must have swam after them, since there's no sign of another boat, but that's really just my best guess. Then he glares at the eel and tells it to fuck off, and it...does. I guess Shanks has some kind of animal-controlling power, or something? Or maybe the last time the giant eel met him he was shooting cannons at it, and it's still afraid of him? I don't know. Anyway, the eel retreats, and then the next page includes the panel above that shows Shanks' arm missing and Luffy mysteriously not sinking even though neither of them appear to be holding onto each other.

How the hell did it get his arm without also getting Luffy?

I guess maybe Shanks is supposed to have lost the arm to the bandits before he made it out here? It does look like an awfully clean cut, like you'd expect from a sword rather than teeth. But in that case...is he supposed to have outswam the rowboat with one arm and a freshly bleeding stump?

The visual storytelling and fight choreography throughout this first issue aren't great, but this scene is uniquely baffling.

...

As a side note, the giant moray eel is an animal I have a particular affection for. They're actually smarter and have more personality than any other fish that didn't learn to breathe air, and they can even be friendly if you let them get used to you. I actually used to chill with one sometimes when I was doing a volunteer thing in the Carribean.

On one hand, if they could get that big then they probably would eat people, sure, most carnivores would. On the other hand, they get a bad enough rep as it is, and there's any number of other sea monsters the mangaka could have come up with.

...

Not too long after this, the pirates take off for good. Luffy has learned what an incredible man Shanks is, and has stopped whining about wanting to join his crew. Although, on the eve of their departure, well...make what you will of this:

While the framing of the timeskip implies that Luffy really does feel terrible about (possibly?) costing Shanks his arm, there's little sign of like. I dunno. Gratitude? Or apologies for costing him a valuable treasure in addition to his arm?

Still inexplicably fond of and charitable toward Luffy, Shanks gives him a straw hat that he tells him to keep.

-____-

At this point, I'd be more satisfied if Shanks decided to use Luffy as a literal anchor.

Anyway, that's the end of the first issue, and the origins of Luffy's distinctive hat that he'll be wearing for the entire rest of the manga. What have we learned? Basically, that our hero is a Mary Sue among Mary Sues who the other characters and the story itself will put up with absolutely anything from and still keep on rewarding him.

I think the thing that annoys me most about this story is that Shanks is so obviously a better protagonist for us to be following. Or at least, he seems like he probably would be if it weren't for Luffy's narrative black hole pulling him into its gravity well.

Truly phenomenal.

...

The second issue starts a decade later, with Luffy as a young man ready to strike off on his own and follow his dream of being the bestest pirate ever. And, while it isn't anything in the neighbourhood of "good," this story is at least a substantial improvement over the previous. Late-teenaged Luffy rows away from his village to seek his piratical fortune, while the elders on the beach murmur darkly about how he might get their town in trouble with the navy if he does something too stupid.

On one hand, Luffy has learned how to use his Mr. Fantastic powers much more effectively by now. When that giant eel tries to get up in his business, he demonstrates this by doing a sort of catapult-punch stretching his arm back and letting it snap forward again.

I mean, I'd root for the eel against Luffy any day, but it's still kinda cool I guess.

Unfortunately, not long after this, Luffy gets pulled into a whirlpool. And he has no way of getting the boat out of it. Or of swimming. He's sort of dispassionately peeved about this.

This relates to something that'll be relevant going forward. After these first couple of issues, One Piece becomes an adventure-comedy rather than a battle-manga with a few comic elements. Maybe it eventually changes back, but for most of the first volume it's really all about the gags.

Which is probably for the best. The art style is far and away better suited for that, and Luffy's behavior becomes *much* more tolerable when its consequences are being played for laughs rather than drama.

However, this second episode is still kind of working this out. It's much more openly silly than the first, but it still hasn't quite found the right balance.

...

We now jump over to Koby, an enslaved cabin boy aboard another pirate ship. These pirates aren't of the same romanticized variety as Captain Shanks' bunch. Their schtick is that their captain, Iron-Mace Alvida, cultivates a hyperfeminine aesthetic and is obsessed with beauty and cleanliness, which means endless janitorial work for Koby. The gag accompanying this is that Alvida is really ugly, which...YMMV on the humor value of that, but I wasn't especially amused.

Granted, she's at least ugly in an intimidating way. Her crew are very rightly terrified of her, and she's self-evidently deadly with her namesake weapon. Better than the alternative.

At the moment, Alvida's ship is parked at their secret island base, where Koby and some other bottom-rung crew members are hauling the latest loot from ship to warehouse. Koby finds a barrel with something in it washed up on the beach and decides to bring it in too. Somehow, he and the other pirates think it has rum in it, despite it actually containing a living human body. Those two things don't feel, sound, or distribute their weight the same, but maybe Luffy is using his Mr. Fantastic powers to assume a semiliquid state or something. Apparently that whirlpool sucked down his boat, but not that barrel he had. Anyway, they bring it in, Luffy decides that now is the time to burst out, and um...Alvida storms into the room, thinking she heard them slacking off, and kicks everybody through the wall? I think? She's yelling at them, there's an explosion, and then everyone is scattered around the forest.

And uh. Luffy in his barrel gets launched much deeper into the woods than everything else. Except...Koby ALSO got launched further along with him, because next thing we know Alvida is yelling at all the other swabbies where they're sprawled out on the beach, and Luffy and Koby are having a private conversation out of sight in the forest.

Like I said, this mangaka really has a long way to go when it come to visual storytelling. Especially in action sequences. Like, even going on pure Loony Tunes slapstick logic, I have no idea what's supposed to have happened here.

Anyway. Luffy tells Koby who he is and what he's trying to do (ie, hope that barrel floats him to somewhere where he can get a crew and ship capable of hunting down the One Piece and making him the greatest pirate lord since Gold Roger). Koby shares his own dream of joining the navy and fighting pirates; his experience as an unwilling member of Alvida's crew has understandably given him a dim view of pirates and a rosy view of the so-called navy. Also, Koby's backstory is almost as embarrassing as Luffy's, and Luffy is a prick about it even though he's in the same tier.

I'm pretty sure Koby is also like...12 years old to Luffy's 17 or so. So uh, yeah. I still want Luffy to be used as a literal ship anchor.

Luffy's courage and audacity (even if they're stupid courage and audacity) inspire Koby to try and improve his life or die trying just like Luffy is doing. So, when Alvida finds them and makes to beat Koby up for not working, he defies her. And this, in turn, earns Luffy's respect. So Luffy punches Alvida in the face with his anti-seamonster rubber punch, putting her in a coma. Granted, she also did try to kill Luffy with her big mace for being unfamiliar and suspicious, so that was also part of Luffy's motivation.

The pirates are sufficiently intimidated that they happily give the two boys a dinghy and send them along their way to the nearest naval fiefdom. Koby, hoping to enlist. Luffy, hoping to rescue and recruit a notorious bounty hunter who's reportedly run afoul of the law and is being held there.

Koby and Luffy recognize that if they do succeed at becoming a marine and a pirate, respectively, they'll be enemies. Potentially deadly enemies. But, for now, there's some mutual respect along with the mutual destination. The sequel hook in the last few panels, I assume, was retroactively added to the "One Piece" version of this second standalone Luffy story.


Like I said, the second issue is a substantial improvement over the first (it's also much shorter, but I don't know if that's causative). It still has a lot of the same issues, with the unlikeable protag who the narrative goes out of its way for, and the obtuse action sequences, but it doesn't have them as badly. The much more overt humorous elements, meanwhile, give the work a draw that it lacked in the beginning, though not quite enough of one at least for me.

When I said that the art style of this era of shonen manga was anime-influenced, well, I think you can see what I mean. The superdeformed style and chaotic action pieces look like they'd work much better in an animated medium, and I strongly suspect that the visual problems come from the author not yet understanding the strengths and limitations of the comic vs the video.

To be clear, this is not remotely a condemnation of Eichiro Oda as an artist. I think he was still in his teens (or very early twenties at most) when he drew the original versions of these stories. As you'll see in my next post, he improved significantly in the couple of years that passed between finishing these and starting One Piece as a serial. I can only assume that he's improved even more significantly over the decades of practice since completing the material that constitutes Volume One. Everyone has to start somewhere.